


Not Dead Yet

by orphan_account



Series: The 48: Sonic the Hedgehog [1]
Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comic)
Genre: Elise is kind of creepy, Gen, Knuckles and Sonic being friends, Sonic 06 coda, Sonic being a chaos-sink, coming back from the dead sucks, except that didn't technically happen in the comics, time travel is weird, whatever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 19:30:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8590816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Soleanna is a strange city, with a strange Duchess, and Sonic's been acting weird since they got here. But hey, he's only recently come back from being dead for a year and Knuckles knows them feels, so... it's probably nothing. Right?





	

As humans went, Elise was pretty, he guessed. Not that he’d ever really understood the whole human thing – too little fur and way too tall. But he guessed, if you were into that sort of thing, she’d be pretty. Humans all had flat faces, and hers was exceptionally so. She had nice eyes, even he could see that. And that little bob she did when she smiled was cute, if you liked cute girls.

To be honest, though, Knuckles just didn’t get it. But, then, he’d always been a little creeped out by Sonic’s five fingers, and at least he was still a _Mobian_. Humans were just weird.

Most people seemed to be in agreement with him. None of them were really comfortable in any of the human cities they’d come across in the last few years, though Sally was so diplomatic she _made_ herself fit in, and Sonic could fit in anywhere simply by smiling that dumb grin of his, which meant Tails fit in by proxy. But for the most part, they didn’t really like being around Overlanders or humans any more than they had to.

Except... this time.

This time, Sonic was lingering.

Not to the point that it would be noticeable on anyone else, but if you really knew Sonic, and you knew the pace he generally lived at, you couldn’t help but notice how he hung around the city. You had to notice how he was always there when they had meetings with the duchess. And he wasn’t exactly subtle about how he kept staring at her.

Which got even weirder when you noticed she was doing the same.

It had been Vector that suggested maybe there was something going on. Some spark of attraction. He’d mainly done it to gross out Mighty (it didn’t work) and tick off Julie-Su (it worked all too well), but now it was twelve hours later, and Knuckles was trailing behind his former nemesis, watching and wondering as Sonic kept fighting to make Elise laugh.

“Mr Sonic, don’t be silly!” she giggled, covering her mouth with her hand. “There’s no such thing!”

“There totally is! It lives in this little lake thing in the middle of Blackwaste.”

“You’re telling me stories,” she said confidently, and Sonic grinned.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make them any less true!”

She laughed again, but it quickly trailed off as they all noticed the door up ahead open and Elise’s secretary stepped out, holding a clipboard full of paper. She sighed, turning to face Sonic with her hands clasped over her chest. “This was a lot of fun. Thank you for the walk. And the stories.”

“Any time, Elise,” he murmured, and she blushed, ducking her head before turning away. Sonic let her take three steps before calling out again. She spun around, eyes wide and expectant, and Knuckles frowned when Sonic paused. But then he lifted his hand to give her a thumbs-up. “Nice smile.”

She blinked, then blushed and giggled again, nodding once before rushing over to her secretary. Sonic’s smile immediately disappeared, but he kept staring after her, even as Knuckles stepped up beside him.

He gave Sonic almost an entire minute before lifting a sardonic eyebrow in his direction. “Look, True Blue, I know you’ve been kinda striking out with the ladies lately, but –”

“Dude, you finish that sentence I will be keel-hauling you at eighty,” Sonic snapped, but he didn’t look away from the glass doors they could still see Elise through. “Keep me outta your sicko fantasies.”

“My sick fantasies?” he repeated. “I’m not the one chatting up a human.”

Finally, Elise slipped out of view, and Sonic could turn his undistracted glare onto Knuckles. “I’m not chatting her up. Believe me, if I was hitting on a girl, no secretary could interrupt.” He paused again, glancing back at the doors, then shook his head and turned away.

Knuckles gazed back at the palace for a moment, just long enough to see Elise’s face pop up in one of the windows. She was obviously talking to someone, but she stared out of the window at Sonic’s back, a familiar smile on her lips. Knuckles felt his stomach knot a little, but amazingly, he wasn’t entirely sure it was in disgust. He quickly turned and hurried after Sonic.

“Funny. For someone who’s not hitting on a girl, you’re getting a really flirty response.”

Sonic didn’t look at him or consciously react, but anyone who’d been around him as much as Knuckles had could notice the slight stiffening of his spines. “Yeah. I noticed that.”

“I think she likes you, _hedgehog_.”

His spines stiffened a little more, but again, Sonic didn’t look around. In fact, he didn’t even say anything. Knuckles gazed at him appraisingly, trying to decide what such a reaction meant. It never ceased to amaze him how someone as open and honest as Sonic could be so very closed off about his deeper emotions. It was like he honestly tried to be shallow.

“That bother you?” he asked quietly, and Sonic tilted his head a little.

“I... I dunno. It’s...” He shook his head, scrunching his eyes and muzzle. “I mean, yeah, it’s weird that she’s a human, ’cause, I mean... well, y’know.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, it’s weird enough going outside your own species sometimes. There’s obvious issues that I’m totally not quite ready to think on right now. But at least if it’s another Mobian, you’re still in the same... y’know... small and furry and cuddly and in something resembling proportion,” he said, gesturing around his head in reference to the way the human head often looked so tiny on those tall bodies. Knuckles smirked, and Sonic grimaced. “And besides, even if she wasn’t human, I’m still not goin’ there. It – she – I dunno, something about her gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

Knuckles raised his eyebrows, leaning back on his hips in surprise. “It didn’t look like it.”

“Dude, we’re friends, yeah?”

He blinked, once again struck dumb by the sudden change of subject. Not to mention a subject they went out of their way to avoid. “Uh – well – I wouldn’t say _friends_ –”

Sonic just smirked at him, and Knuckles glared back, fighting his blush. He didn’t actually have a problem with being friends with Sonic—the hedgehog was a good guy, and he did care about him a lot—it was just that admitting to it was kind of embarrassing.

But of course, Sonic just skipped over it. “Most people think we hate each other’s guts, you know that, right?”

“Okay, yeah, sure, but as you just made me acknowledge, I don’t think that,” he pointed out. “So don’t try and tell me I’m reading you wrong.”

“Sorry, Red, but y’are. Whatever me and Elise are doin’, it ain’t romantic. Not on my side, anyways,” he added with a slight grimace.

“I’ll buy that. But you said she scares you—”

“She doesn’t _scare_ me.”

“—and whatever you and Elise are doing, it sure doesn’t look like you don’t want to be near her,” he argued. “So what am I supposed to think?”

Sonic just shook his head and moved so fast that Knuckles didn’t even notice he was gone until he suddenly saw that Sonic had moved several metres away in the time it had taken Knuckles to take a single step. But he had obviously decided not to run off, because he remained where he was, standing still with his eyes closed, until Knuckles was beside him again. He bowed his head in the closest either of them would come to an apology and continued in step until they reached the courtyard. Once they hit the open ground, Knuckles leapt up into the air and Sonic fell into a lazy trot, and they headed out across the city, lazily working their way around the winding streets and across intricate rooftops. When they reached the clocktower though, Sonic didn’t weave his way around or through it the way Knuckles was expecting, but instead raced right up the side to stand on the rooftop, where he finally stopped and stared out across the skyline.

Knuckles looped back to drop down beside him, and smiled a little at the pink sunset. “It’s a nice city.”

“Yeah... it really knows how to throw a party, too.” Sonic grinned, folding his arms into his quills behind his head. “I was here a year or so ago – few months before you died. They were celebrating their anniversary or somethin’. I was chasin’ down Nack the Weasel. Didn’t find ’im of course, but hey. It was awesome. Fireworks and flaming decorations and all kindsa stuff. There was this big parade, too, down on the river. Elise was on the major barge, just smiling and waving. Whatever.”

Knuckles peered at him curiously, but Sonic didn’t look around, and kept up his grin as he continued, “Dunno why, but I was in a really rockin’ mood that night. I was on my own – Sal was obsessing over Tails goin’ to school at that point. But I was on my own and just... happy to be okay. Just... running and feeling the wind. It felt really awesome to be alive.”

“I get like that, sometimes,” he said quietly, looking away again. “I wake up in the morning, and it really hits me that I’m not dead. That I didn’t go insane, and I didn’t stay dead, and I’m just... I’m okay. It’s a great feeling.”

“Yeah... except that there’s this feeling that comes with it where you just know, somehow, that it could’ve been different,” Sonic added. “That if one thing had changed, you’d be dead.”

Knuckles’ head snapped around, and he frowned at the quiet smile still on Sonic’s lips. “Yeah... and you were feeling this before the Xorda?”

“Mm... that one night I came here. And now... every time I look at Elise,” he murmured. “One wrong move... somewhere along the line... and the whole world could’ve ended.”

“What?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. It’s just the feeling I’ve got. That maybe – maybe something _should_ have happened, but didn’t. And because it didn’t, we’re all okay now.” Almost unconsciously, Sonic untangled one arm from his quills and rubbed his ribcage, just below his heart, before lifting his hand back to run his finger over his bottom lip.

Knuckles swallowed at a sudden, if small, rise in chaos energy, and watched in silence as a wind he couldn’t feel ruffled Sonic’s spines to tilt them up on the ends. But as Sonic lowered his hand, the tips of his spines fell too, and the chaos energy faded. Knuckles just cleared his throat and looked away again, pretending not to have noticed anything. Sonic did that sometimes – gave off waves of energy he didn’t seem aware of or even notice. But they always disappeared as quickly as they came, so Knuckles quite happily pretended they didn’t exist.

They stood in silence for almost a full minute, watching the skyline. It wasn’t the first time Knuckles had wanted to ask Sonic questions he wasn’t sure he really wanted answers to. But death seemed to be one of their unspoken topics – they agreed it sucked, and that they would still go to it happily if it meant saving someone they cared about (or pretty much anyone at all, in Sonic’s case, these days. Freaking martyr.), but they didn’t talk about it. They didn’t talk about coming back from it either.

This, however, was a grey area. He wasn’t sure if it counted as talking about death if they were talking about a death that didn’t actually happen – or if it did, it was erased by some kind of magic mojo, and that was something Knuckles didn’t like talking about. And besides, this was more than just Sonic dying – he was suggesting the whole world had nearly been completely destroyed.

“It went up in flames.”

Knuckles blinked, and barely kept himself from looking around. Sonic had a curious, flat edge to his voice, as if he weren’t entirely aware of what he was saying. Somehow, Knuckles just knew that if he moved at all, Sonic would snap out of it and change the subject, aware or not.

“I heard it coming... I should have turned earlier, but I didn’t. It was hot and white... and then the whole world burned.” From the corner of his eye, Knuckles could see Sonic rubbing his ribs again. But still, he didn’t turn. He couldn’t. Not now. Sonic let out a soft breath, like a sigh that never was. “Time didn’t matter, except that it did. Time was everything. The past, the present, the future, it came together to destroy the world and start it again. Everything is flames...”

And suddenly, it didn’t make any sense, but Knuckles could see it too. Darkness everywhere, but this overwhelming sense of heat and flames, as if everything had burned and turned to ash. And even though he knew Sonic was standing right beside him, for some reason he felt like he’d never see that stupid, cocky grin again. It was that same heavy feeling that had permeated the world while Sonic was in space. He took a deep breath and forced himself to see the horizon again; to focus on the shapes of the buildings and the soft flow of Chaos energy that was Sonic standing whole and alive beside him.

“It’s weird, though,” Sonic said, his voice suddenly loud and direct, and Knuckles flinched before turning to meet his gaze. “Even though Elise makes me think of all that stuff, I look at her, and all I can see is snow. Ice. Cold stuff, you know? And that should be bad, but... it’s not. It’s like... even though I’m here, and thinking about the world ending, I look at Elise and know it didn’t turn out like that. Her snow put out the flames. Crazy, huh?”

For a long few seconds, Knuckles just stared back at him. Surprisingly, Sonic didn’t get bored and look away – he just smiled right back, as if he had all the time in the world to let them think through the problem.

“Yeah,” Knuckles said finally. “Crazy.”

Sonic nodded once, then looked back at the sky, taking a few steps toward the edge of the roof. He paused with one foot on the gutter, and grinned over his shoulder. “C’mon. Sally wants us to go to some meeting with the Duke later, and I wanna have some fun first.”

“Sure. Race you to the edge of the city and back to the castle? Neither of us touches the ground.”

“Ooh, a challenge. I like it. You’re on!” he said, then took a few steps back to stand beside him. “Ready?”

“Set.”

“Go!” they both shouted, and took off. Because they were in Soleanna, and they weren’t dead yet.

**Author's Note:**

> The 48 is a collection of unfinished and/or pointless fics saved to my hard drive, now posted on Ao3 for people's interest or in case they want to adopt them.
> 
> Apparently, Flynn has said that 06 did happen in the comics, but due to the fact that by its own rules, it never happened, it didn't happen in the comics. Therefore, at some point, the Archie characters were in Soleanna, and we just didn't see it because it was such a non-event.
> 
> ...uh huh.
> 
> I never tried to play Sonic 06, but I have watched many playthroughs and cutscene movies. Often those are more forgiving than playthroughs, but no... it was just a bad, bad game. Ah well. Time travel must have consequences, I figure. Especially for people who live on the cusp of omnipotence.


End file.
